Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren prepare for round two in Monday debate

John J. Monahan TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Sunday

Sep 30, 2012 at 12:11 AMSep 30, 2012 at 10:51 AM

Unfortunately, by the time the second U.S. Senate debate race begins tomorrow night, the hype will probably have voters wondering if it is a chance for the candidates to tell voters about their ideas and positions or some kind of armed gladiatorial combat.

More than 4,500 people will be in the audience, no doubt cheering for their candidate, and it is being held in an arena, formerly the Tsongas Arena, now carrying the more formal name of the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell.

At their last debate Elizabeth Warren won points for poise and addressing the issues, while her opponent, Scott Brown, lost some for being at times too aggressive and appearing a bit snide as split screens on television showed him reacting to her statements and responses.

Things have changed since WBZ-TV's John Keller put questions to the pair, mostly in terms of the ramped up personal attacks Brown has unleashed in ads and on the stump, even as he said he wanted the tone of the contest to be ratcheted down.

The debate will allow both to follow up on allegations he made in the first debate, when he asserted that she falsely claimed minority status when applying for jobs at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania decades ago. She continues to rebut the accusation while his campaign has been unable to back up the claim with any hard evidence or documentation.

This time it will be the normally affable David Gregory of NBC's “Meet the Press” moderating and posing questions, while two students from the school are also expected to offer questions.

The one-hour format, however, could easily be eaten up by Brown lobbing accusations against Warren, which is emerging as a central theme of his re-election campaign. Asked to size up his view of the upcoming debate, Brown said he was very pleased with the first and is eager to take Warren on again.

“I'm just going to be myself, point out to the voters that she wants to leave blood and teeth on the floor and not compromise and throw rocks. I have left people to imagine 100 professor Warrens down there versus me as the second most bipartisan senator, being a problem solver, finding solutions,” Brown said of his debate plans.

Expect Brown to also continue attacking her legal work which he focused on last week, while demanding she disclose more about her past corporate clients as she is one of the top bankruptcy law experts in the country.

Warren could launch a new offensive this time around, countering Brown's attacks by painting him as someone trying to unfairly smear her. She got some ammo in that regard last week when the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation condemned Brown staffers as offensive and racist for leading mock Indian war chants at their rallies.

That statement from the Cherokee chief from Oklahoma, who has said he believes Warren has done nothing wrong by claiming Native American heritage and notes that she never claimed membership of any tribe, prompted Brown to warn his staff not to continue with the offensive behavior.

Brown said he regretted the chants and tomahawk antics, but did not apologize. He said he does not feel he was personally responsible for those actions of his staff and supporters.

In the aftermath of that skirmish, his campaign put up a new ad with a woman calling Warren a liar.

Since the first debate, Karl Rove has entered the fray with his Super PAC sponsoring a phone call campaign against Warren. That could prompt Warren to tie Brown to Rove, who was President George W. Bush's top political adviser. It will also give her more ground to emphasize Brown's links to the very conservative forces in Congress as well as his longtime support for Mitt Romney.

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Notably absent from the political scene last week was Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Murray who was on a trade mission to Germany, trying to advance the state's commercial and academic links.

I caught up with Murray by phone while he was on Germany's famed autobahn motorway, made famous for allowing vehicles to travel at unlimited speeds.

He had just left four days of meetings and tours in Dresden and Leipzig in what was formerly East Germany and was on his way to Berlin. Murray was traveling with a group in a van. He said it was going about 55 miles per hour, in the farthest right hand lane, but noted, “The cars in the third lane are going pretty fast though.”

Germany is Massachusetts' fourth largest trading partner in terms of imports and exports.

“I think the reason you see that strong trading is because we both have a strong innovation economies and advanced manufacturing,” he said, creating potent synergies between the two economies.

On Friday while in Berlin, besides touring the Reichstag Building, the seat of the German parliament, Murray was meeting with Karl Storz, an international medical device manufacturer with headquarters in Germany and a production facility in Charlton. Also while in Berlin, he was having a second meeting with representatives of Germany Trade and Invest to talk about biotech and life science industry opportunities in Massachusetts.

Murray said throughout his trip he has also been meeting with companies that are linking with local vocational schools to train skilled workers, a concept he is promoting to do more to link skills and available jobs in Massachusetts.

A big promoter of mass transit and rail and a critic of Boston's Big Dig project, Murray walked through a $1 billion, four mile train tunnel that connects five stations in Leipzig. He said it could serve as a model for linking the North-South rail network systems in Boston that terminate at South Station and North Station but are not connected by rail.

John J. Monahan covers the Statehouse for the Telegram & Gazette.

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